Continual Recommender Systems
It fills a gap for researchers and practitioners in recommender systems and related fields by focusing on domain-specific challenges like balancing stability and plasticity.
This tutorial addresses the lack of guidance on applying continual learning to recommender systems, which must adapt to dynamic user interests and item trends without forgetting past preferences, by providing a comprehensive overview and highlighting recent practical efforts.
Modern recommender systems operate in uniquely dynamic settings: user interests, item pools, and popularity trends shift continuously, and models must adapt in real time without forgetting past preferences. While existing tutorials on continual or lifelong learning cover broad machine learning domains (e.g., vision and graphs), they do not address recommendation-specific demands-such as balancing stability and plasticity per user, handling cold-start items, and optimizing recommendation metrics under streaming feedback. This tutorial aims to make a timely contribution by filling that gap. We begin by reviewing the background and problem settings, followed by a comprehensive overview of existing approaches. We then highlight recent efforts to apply continual learning to practical deployment environments, such as resource-constrained systems and sequential interaction settings. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future research directions. We expect this tutorial to benefit researchers and practitioners in recommender systems, data mining, AI, and information retrieval across academia and industry.